How I Made $13,490.50 With Adsense Last&nbspNovember

This post was promoted from YouMoz. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.

Black Friday: Thanksgiving’s Annual After-Party

It’s almost here--the shopping party that consumers have been waiting for since last Christmas! As the unofficial opening of the holiday shopping season, the Friday after Thanksgiving or “Black Friday” is hands-down THE most promoted day of the year. For decades Black Friday has been recognized by retailers as the point they begin to turn a profit, or move from the red into “the black.” According to the National Retail Federation, Black Friday and holiday sales can account for up to 40% of annual retail sales for many business sectors, making it crucial for them to have valuable deals for shoppers. More recently the annual shopping party has expanded to “Cyber Monday,” when consumers jump online and grab holiday bargains from their computers, tablets and smartphones.

It’s also the day that retailers finally announce their absolute best deals of the year, offering their hottest savings on toys, electronics, apparel, jewelry, housewares and more. But more than that, it’s the time of year when consumers want to know about each and every door-buster and early-bird sale, ASAP. They fervently begin the hunt, hoping to find deeply discounted Black Friday ads as soon as they are leaked.

How I Leveraged Black Friday Fever and Made $13,500 in Just One Month

Recognizing a profitable opportunity, I created a website that gives people what they want: early intel about Black Friday discounts and hot items.

Meet ThanksgivingBlackFridayAds.com (TBFA), a website focused solely on publishing leaked Black Friday ads and circulars weeks before they are printed and distributed in the media. Traffic spikes at TBFA every year just after Halloween, when shoppers start thinking about holiday sales. Visitors flood the site hoping to get an early peek at the ads to plan their Black Friday shopping day. In its third year (last year), TBFA continued to gain strength. It’s a healthy site through the holidays and sits basically idle other months of the year.

The year-over-year growth of TBFA had been extraordinary until this 2012 Black Friday because of a Google penalty. (Yes, I tried removing bad links, uploaded a disavow list, apologized and then resubmitted the site for reconsideration, but I have a feeling Google is putting off the reconsideration until they know it's too late for me this year... I submitted the reconsideration request on Oct 19th and followed up again on Oct 31, but still have not heard a word from Google.) This year, organic traffic is down 95% due to the penalty. It doesn't help either that Yahoo/Bing decided to globally deindex almost any site that had the words "Black Friday" in its domain name too.

For the past three years I had consistently tracked a 500 to 1,000% boost in site activity, each year attracting more visitors than projected. Wisely, I had decided to implement the most optimized tools and technology to meet the growing demand. Last November TBFA easily served 5.9 million pages to 413,458 visitors within the 30-day month. At the height of our traffic surge, it served approximately 600 concurrent users up to 900 pages per minute. I was prepared for the traffic rush. Visitors never saw an increase in average page load times, even when the site was under heavy load, as documented here: https://pagodabox.com/case-studies/scale-wordpress-case-study.

Anyways... having a strong, established site with a growing audience, the next challenge was to quickly and efficiently monetize the opportunity. I implemented Adsense--a free Google product that allows a site like ThanksgivingBlackFridayAds.com to earn money when visitors click on Google ads. Ads compete in an auction, and Google automatically selects and places the ones that have the best revenue potential for each site. Earnings are determined on a Cost Per Click (CPC) basis, where the site is paid when a visitor clicks on a display ad. Not all ads earn at the same rate. Payouts vary daily due to advertiser budgets, site content, and the actual ads that visitors click.

My Best Performing Ads

Fact: The ad with the most impressions had the most clicks, earning the most revenue.

By far, the 468x60 display ads placed in the middle of the blog posts made the most revenue, followed by the 728x90 leaderboards placed at the bottom of each page displaying Black Friday ad scans. I was surprised to find that a 160x600 skyscraper ad with the best Clickthrough rate (CTR) didn’t generate the most money. Most likely, this was because of daily variances in ad pricing.

Another Success Metric: Ad Request RPM

Revenue per thousand impressions (RPM) projects the estimated earnings a site can accrue for every thousand ad impressions it receives. An RPM doesn't show how much a site has actually earned. Instead, it calculates the approximate value of ad impressions by dividing estimated earnings by the number of page views, impressions, or queries received (a.k.a. ad requests), then multiplying by 1,000.

Ad request RPM = (Estimated earnings / Number of ad requests) x 1,000

Example: if a site earns an estimated $60 from 15,000 ad requests, the Ad Request RPM would be ($60 / 15,000) x 1,000 or $4.00.

My best-performing ad, measured in RPMs, was a Skyscraper along the right column sidebar, appearing on only a handful of the pages. This ad spot definitely stands out from the rest, since it had the highest Ad Request (CTR), the lowest CPC and the highest RPM. With more experimentation, I’ll be able to bring about the maximum ROI for that ad placement.

I Made Even More Money Working With Affiliate Sales

My revenue stream for TBFA wasn’t limited only to Adsense. I also made plenty of money working with affiliate advertisers who gained sales from exposure on my site.

Google Affiliate Network

Whenever a visitor clicked on an offer and purchased from a Google-placed affiliate advertiser, I earned performance fees for helping those quality advertisers drive conversions, or sales. This revenue is above and beyond what I earned from Adsense.

Similar to Adsense, publishers put text links, banner ads and coupons codes on their sites. With PepperJam and Skimlinks and such, I earned a commission with each placement on my site that led to a sale. Amazon Associates is basically the same, but works on a lucrative sliding commission scale. The more an advertiser sells and ships as a result of the ad on my site, the higher the commissions I’m paid. Of all the affiliate programs, I made the most, by far, from Amazon.

You Can Do It, Too

The holiday season is prime time to maximize web traffic, engage with your audience, and make some money. Sites are seeing plenty of traffic from several sources like email, referrals from links and ad placements, organic searches and more. And, those referrals are looking to buy, so it’s an optimum time to cash in on those ad clicks and commissions from affiliate sites. Working with affiliate programs is an easy process and doesn’t take much time. Give it a shot, test the ad placements, and tweak your system as you go to up your performance level.

So, was this blog post helpful to you? Did my $13,490 payout make you want to monetize your website as a new revenue stream? Anything you think I could have done differently or added for better performance? I’d love to hear your thoughts and am happy to answer any questions. Just leave a reply for me in the comments section below.

Very interesting post Scott. The whole path that led me to become a SEO started with affiliate marketing, so it's really interesting to hear another SEO talk about it. You know, I made really good money from three different Websites I owned, way way back, like 2004-2006. As you discovered, times change, climate changes, Google changes. I went from making well over $70K a year to next to nothing in a matter of months, so that was pretty scary. Fortunately, I talked someone into hiring me as a SEO strategist, despite the fact that I had zero agency or corporate (or e-commerce eve) experience.

Now that I've developed as a SEO, I wonder what would happen if I experimented with a return to affiliate marketing. Perhaps you've inspired me to try that. It was a great life, I have to admit. Total freedom. What's amazing is how well I did without knowing anything (heck I didn't even know what HTML was when I started, lol). I wonder if I applied what I know now to a new site of my own what would happen? Hmmmm........:-) Thanks Scott!

Hi Danatan SEO, That's interesting. It seems your experience is backwards to mine. You started with affiliate marketing and then turned to SEO. :-) Yes... times do change! It's crazy how vulnerable the visibility or profitability of a website can be. Almost as scary as the stock market. haha.It's great to hear you did so well with it in years previously... You should definitely apply your new found knowledge and skills to something like that now.

That's very interesting about the page title making a difference. I have honestly never considered that factor. Most of my experience is in the SEO realm. I'm still fairly new at Adsense and affiliate marketing. I suppose though, that the keywords that cost the most per click could also net you a lot of $ per click on the Adsense side of things too. A world I'd soon like to explore!

Hi Markus. Thanks for the article and the list of most expensive keywords. Interesting to note that lawyers and attorneys are paying the highest sums on PPC. I have worked with a few law firms and initially found them to be overly eager to pay for PPC over investing into SEO. This is why the PPC for legal matters and claims are so high, they are trying to out bid each other all the time.

I love reading about success stories like this. Thanks so much for sharing. It inspires me to keep working on my site that makes me money with Adsense.On a side note, I wanted to comment on this statement, "I submitted the reconsideration request on Oct 19th and followed up again on Oct 31, but still have not heard a word from Google."There is a good chance that your second reconsideration request pushed you back to the end of the queue. Lately, since the disavow tool became available, the response time from Google is much longer.

Hi Marie,Yes... keep on working at it. Hmmm. About the second reconsideration request pushing back to the end of the queue... Can someone confirm this could be the case? I'm not exactly sure how their system works and it would be neat to hear from someone who has had experience with submitting and then hearing back from Google.Scott

Well, it's all over for this year. :-) I was able to make my investment back this year at least and came out a couple thousand dollars ahead. A far cry from last year, but I think I'll be able to clear up the 'suspicious link' penalty within the next 9 or so months. Here's hoping!

Yoav. Bring it on! :-) I need help fighting the big guys anyways! The more the merrier. There is so much opportunity to be had and much $ to be made. If you do try out the niche, let me know how you do. ~ Scott

Sorry to hear you're down 95% this year. I'm doing penguin & EMD recovery for a couple sites now and it's not fun to have to disavow, hope, and just do the best you can going forward. Hope it gets sorted out quickly for you and you don't miss the whole holiday season although you're definitely right that once Nov 1 hits, BFAds start up.

Hey Matt, I can imagine it's quite a chore to clean up. And, thanks for the good wishes. Since Black Friday is only 9 days away, I'm pretty sure organic traffic will remain down 95% for the rest of my important season unfortunately... but... there is always next year! I've gotta hear back from Google at least by then, right?! :-) haha.

Awesome idea for capitalizing on the Black Rush to find deals. I have always thought of monetizing one of my sites and this definitely gets me thinking about it again. I hope Google helps you out and you can get the site back up on the SERP.

Do you think that if you did a Black Friday site that was not an exact match domain and just used other SEO elements that you would have been slapped by Google? Or do you just assume that this a link graph penalty?Great post

Philip, What types of sites do you run? You don't have to share the domain, but I'm always interested in hearing other marketers stories. I was thinking of starting a new website on a new domain (that is not exact match) and just starting right from scratch again... but it seems like such a daunting project to building up all that unique content again. I think your idea is great though. Perhaps it is like you say... it could be partially an exact match domain issue mixed with a link graph penalty. Good thinking Philip. Scott

Most of the stuff I run personally does not do well lol. But, I am in the midst of a new venture centered around a blog and ecommerce site dealing with electronic music and hula hoops with LED lights in them. The space is competitive but we have a good product and it doesn't look like any of my direct competitors have SEO going on. But, the sites out there are very ad heavy and we were thinking about shying away to differentiate ourselves.I think that there can definitely be a fine line to tread with ads and alienating your customers when you are doing ecommerce. But, people also expect to see ads a lot of times and don't necessarily get upset if you are doing it well.

I agree that it can be daunting to to undertake a new venture when there is just so many sites out there in every vertical producing solid content and getting links. But, always worth it if you can come up with something good and do it better

Hey Scott, awesome success story! I've used adsense for a while now on a few locally-targeted sites, but haven't really been focused. I think maybe it's time to spend a little time revisiting those sites :). Thanks!

Hi Scott, superb post ...what an Idea .... thanks .... BTW how & from where do you manage to get all those leaked flyers ?? Also would appreciate if you can throw some light on how did you make your site popular in the first couple of years??

The flyers come from many sources. Sometimes they are leaked on other forums, sometimes an affiliate manager sending them directly. Gathering the ads is the hard part.The site became popular mostly because of long tail search traffic in the first years, then in the second and next years I was able to afford distributing press releases and getting content with links back to my site on "mommy blogger" style websites.My competitors, however, like to post their press releases on proprietary fake news sites and such that look like legitimate news outlets. Also, now I have around 20,000 email subscribers that come back to the site almost every time I send out an email blast.

I cannot imagine that i will get a post regarding Google Adsense, affiliate marketing and with many more ideas as i was thinking to do research on these areas because i got a local client who needed this and hired me.

Now, i am more curious to do those experiments and put my ideas on the paper what i was thinking to implement.

Yes! Put it in to practice. Try it out for yourself. It all starts with an idea and a little bit of work. If you can make $5.00 with Adsense, it's possible to make $100,000! I hope the best for your endeavors.. please come back here once you've tried and let us know how it goes. ~ Scott

Hey Samer, For my site, it depends if it is a page with text content or if it's a page with the actual Black Friday ad scan.If you have under 350 words in your blog post, for example, you shouldn't really put an ad at the top, middle and bottom. You might want to manually stop too many ads from showing on a page so it doesn't get too spammy-looking.It is really webmaster preference though and the revenue model of the website. If you site exists to sell a product, you might not want ads in your page content area, so you might just opt for a smaller sidebar ad just in case someone finds the ad relevant and decides to click it. But it you site is just information-based, then it's probably safer to put an ad right inline with the content. I have found personally, that ads in the middle of the content do well, but sometimes it really just depends on what ads Google is showing that certain day or not. If an advertiser is using Remarketing in their Adwords campaigns, then an ad from a website that visitor previously visited might show up on my site, or it might be an ad from a site the visitor has never visited before if they dont have any cookie in their browser tracking their browsing history.Samer, what's your interest in Adsense? Any luck with it so far?~ Scott O.

Hey Scott,Great post - it's awesome to see the transparency with the numbers, as well as a self-admitted bad experience with the links and Google. Major props.I can't wait to see what happens with GG's response to the disavow and see where that goes. I have heard some indicate that it is easier to just move on from the domain than try and fix it. Might be a good follow up post??Anyway, have a great weekend, sir!

Hi Kyle, I like to share my successes and failures.. although the latter is tougher :-) I'll certainly keep everyone updated (here in the comments at least) once I hear back from Google. However, you're right. Perhaps a followup post is in order once this all gets sorted out!~ Scott

John,Regarding retargeting... I have not yet put effort into hitting my audience with other offers for related niches. I'd think there is plenty of opportunity out there for it. Any ideas specifically come to mind? Perhaps we could collaborate on something. ~ Scott

Hi Mike, No. I'd like to next year for sure. The only network I have experience with so far is Adsense. I stuck with that simply because It was easy to implement. I like that the ads are very contextual and there system is reliable. I do think a split test of ad networks is in order! ~ Scott

Scott, Truly an inspirational article. I am a WP Developer and an SEO, and I have quite a few ideas, and domain names that I have kicked around launching Adsense-based revenue stream websites. Using something as niche as Black Friday is great, though it only gives you significant income one month a year.

Hello Zach, I'm happy to learn you were inspired. That site is developed in WP... perhaps you picked up on that right away since I'm basically using the default theme (heavily modified on the back end... no so much on the front end). Right, the income only really comes for one to two months in the year, so it's very important to be found at the top of the search results in that time frame... the rest of the year I make a few bucks on Adsense and a few affiliate sales here and there (almost enough to pay for hosting)! :-)Tell me about your own project(s) when you have time. I'd love to hear.

Hi AJutah, I did experiment a little with ad placement and found that the Leaderboard-sized ads performed best for me on the actual Black Friday ad scan pages, however every page has varying CPC and RPM. ~ Scott

Great article Scott! As a designer, I found your discussion on ad placement inside your posts really interesting and think AJutah's comment above is a great idea - moving ads around to mitigate user "blindness." Does changing ad positioning affect CPC and RPM?

Also, as an employee of Pagoda Box, its exciting to see our service aid in helping users handle significant spikes in traffic, and make a little money off of it.

"Does changing ad positioning affect CPC and RPM?"Yes, there are so many variables that go into it, just like Google's organic search ranking algorithm changes a lot, I image the Adsense algo changes too, perhaps not as frequently... I don't know.

Does anyone here have insight on CPC / RPM with varying ad slots? I haven't tested it enough myself.

It's always interesting to see how different sized ads perform across various industry and scenarios. Most people tend to keep any type of ad performance close to the vest, so thanks for sharing. Yes, you got me thinking about adsense once again ;)

Hi Guillermo, yes, a lot of people keep their cards close to their chest... actually one reason for that might be Google's terms of service. I'm pretty sure they specifically mention that you can't publish your CPC data to the publish. I haven't read through their TOS in its entirety, but that's what I heard from a colleague recently and that's why I blurred out some of the more sensitive data in the screenshots. ~ Scott

I agree with you, doing what you enjoy should be our main goal and I believe this is something we all share in regards to posting our stuff online. It takes a lot of effort and in the end you start wondering "well, maybe I could make money out of this too".

And as anyone else who start having success (and making money) doing what they enjoy, it can get tricky at this point and one can easily lose focus.

I'll take your advices, keep doing what I'm doing and start thinking about ads when it makes sense. I don't think I can mathematically determine the best starting point to have ads on my website, I think it'll just feel right at the right time. :)

Actually, the first two years I did this I didn't even have Adsense on the site. I only did Amazon affiliate links and Google Affiliate Network, Pepper Jam, Linkshare, and Commission Junction.

I was pretty happy with the results from that but quickly realized I was missing out on an opportunity to monetize traffic with Adsense. Last year I made around 65% of my revenue from Adsense and 35% from affiliate sales (mostly through Amazon).

This year I was able to sell ad space and email advertising campaigns to a couple of retailers directly for an upfront fee that wasn't tied into commission on sales. If you have the ability to broker deals directly like that, it can be quite lucrative.

Again though, it all takes time and effort and you need proof that you are able to generate traffic and get eyeballs on your site, otherwise, you'd have to rely on Adsense and affiliate sales.It is difficult to say if one did better without the other, but I think it is a matter of balancing the two. Unfortunately, I only had time this year to really focus on the Adsense optimization, so my purposeful placement of affiliate links was lacking. It changes so much from year to year that split testing is difficult... especially when you have limited resources and time in the month of November. It gets so busy trying to keep up with the ads being leaked!Does that help? ~ Scott.

Chase, this year is a little depressing, but I have a solid email list of around 20,000 subscribers, and whenever I send out a blast it helps Adsense revenues greatly. Unfortunately organic is down literally 95%+ this year, so in better email blasts, it's much lower revenue. Scott

Wow, so all the complaining I hear around the forums and blogs these days is not just noise. I didn't expect it'd be so much, but makes sense. Thanks for sharing. Smart man for having that email list. Best of luck to you this year.

First of all thank you so much for this fantastic article. It's going to help so much to understand the money making tips for all... The truth is that many people ignore high CPC long tail words and join the masses in competing for seed words that aren’t worth fighting for.

While blogging, sometimes I also get high click from $10 to $50, Recently I have got $60.40 from 3 clicks, The Avg per click cost is $20.13, and the country is Netherlands, I guess there are some ads like CPA networks which pays $20 per lead for pin submits etc, good news is, my traffic are from 3rdworlds! Lol!

But I must tell you... Nowadays to get ranking on high CPC keyword is very tough, we have to use only the long tail CPC keywords in our posts, and it will drive more AdSense earnings, you’ll net get this high CPC all the times! But if you want to get high CPC, try to choose high paying niche! E.g., cancer, payday loans, forex, hosting, etc! But if you site about blogging, Adsense money, SEO, etc! Trust me you’ll get crap!

It is also necessary that traffic should come through organic search only. If I drive traffic of USA and UK through social media to my website on keywords having high CPC then shall I will get the same commission as through organic search or will it differ.

I hear what you're saying, monetizing by showing ads surrounds Black Friday ad scan images is an interesting revenue model, I'd agree. But it gives visitors what they want. There are hundreds of thousands of searches made every day in the month of November from people specifically looking for leaked Black Friday ads. I do have hundreds of pages of unique content on the site as well, and for the most part I tried including stories on the Ad scan pages themselves. I was also thinking of adding more sections to the site with info on holiday entertaining, Thanksgiving recipes, etc... perhaps that will add more value. That... and perhaps changing the domain name too :-) ~ Scott

Nice post Scott! You definitely caught my attention with this article. Creating content around not just a given subject, but a real theme, such as a holiday is quite interesting. It does look a little spammy, but its also creative and insightful. Keep up the good work. This is the first time I've seen anyone do something like this. Its nice to think outside the box once and a while! Thumbs up!

Millscottm, Sure.. just let me know. I'm hear to answer any questions you might have about Adsense or affiliate marketing. It's not my day job, but I have learned a lot through constant failure and pushing through! :-) ~ Scott O.

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.thanksgivingblackfridayads.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

WOW, thats a huge list ..... how did you even got so many back-links in the first place ? :-) :-) ... what i understand is that you should start from scratch and disavow almost all of them , the reason being you dont need them as you've already created brand for yourself , also you have thousands of email subscribers so .... keep only those that are reputed else garbage it ...just my personal opinion. good luck !!!

I ran your backlink domain authorities against your top competitors. They have a very predictable backlink profile. Yours is *way* outside the norm on both the high end (DA over 80) and the middle (DA about 30-40). If you look at the report, it's pretty clear why you're penalized. I'm including the actual data chart as well. You can see that you have 8 links with DA in the high high 90s like 99 and almost none from 70-89. That's a bad sign. You also have a very high percentage in the 30-40 range, given the other factors. I would bet that even though I didn't run the data, your page authority and basically most metrics for your links would be "outside the norm" for this site.

In a private email to me tonight, Matt suggested that I ditch as many links as I can.

Seeing as how Google didn't like my first attempt at a disavow list, I think I'll go ahead and disavow everything but the best now.

Hi Scott,I'll get back to your email & this whole text later because I'm walking out the door but ..."In a private email to me tonight, Matt suggested that I ditch as many links as I can."This is somewhat true - but not 100%. I suggest you ditch a majority of the ones causing that very obvious weirdness in the first screenshot. It's pretty obvious that the unnatural links come from the 30-40 and 85+ range so yes, I'd ditch a number of those - but maybe you can do what we started earlier, which is to also grow the numbers of links outside of that. If you had a typical distribution from 20-70, that would help, along with disavowing the forum & blog comment stuff that is doing you no good.At least, that's my 2c. I hope all the data helps!~Matt

Ah yes.. that's right. Sorry for misquoting you. I will definitely ditch the ones in the range that are creating the weirdness in the link profile as you suggested. Matt, your data is very valuable. I'm very impressed with your research and reporting skills and I thank you for the time you've put into this. Perhaps we'll have to do a joint case study on the results in a few month?!~Scott O.

This is a pretty good technique right now. Spam garbage links to a site to rank it quick, make some quick cash before the Google slap comes down. Don't need to worry about quality or keeping the site since the sale only lasts for a short time.

Just have to pick a time sensitive sale or event. Make your money. Move to the next one.

Update:Today I uploaded a new Disavowed List to GWT.Of the entire "Latest Links" that I downloaded from my GWT account, I submitted 2228 spammy or 'not found' links. 654 of the total links to my site were ok, so I left those out of the list. (I spent an entire afternoon and part of the evening clicking through every link.I'll reply here once I've heard back from Google. Here's hoping!Scott

Great success Sccot , I have been in shopping site too and done auction and classified but due to a lot of competition and lack of traffic I lost the interest since my domain is aged now I would like to know what niche and how to start in the shopping site too. if you look at my site I am just trying to keep the site live to find a better idea to use the domain . so how did you achieve to bring traffic and how to start the affiliate as I found it very savvy , I am open to your suggestion .

It really was a great read scott and thanks for your answer in PM. I wrote something for youmoz about integrating adsenses into your website but for some reason they turned it down. Funny to read how you made your money. Inspirational? Yes.. definitely.